Re: [Gendispatch] Meetings summary

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2020, at 02:43, Christian Huitema wrote:
> 
> On 10/16/2020 6:02 AM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
> > Systemic racism is a somewhat poorly defined and amorphous term which
> > is at the same time both unfalsifiable and yet gets conflated across
> > to broader racism which is a very strong accusation of awfulness
> 
> 
> You may want to walk that back. You have done a good job of producing a
> document that sticks to practical issues and avoids unnecessary
> controversy, but here you are somewhat gratuitously digging into the
> people using the "systemic racism" language. Believe it or not, but
> there are definitely issues, at least in the USA, that contribute to
> "keeping down" a fraction of the population. There is a fair amount of
> good research about this, for example the documentation of the effects
> of "redlining" in "The Color of Law" by Richard Bronstein. Downplaying
> all that as "unfalsifiable" or "an accusation of awfulness" is not going
> to help bring IETF consensus.

Yes, you're right - I phrased that badly, putting in both an important question which I believe is at the key of a lot of the disagreement, and a bunch of off-the-cuff commentary which did nothing to help.

Thanks for bringing up redlining and similar laws, which could certainly make the case of there being systemic racism in the past of the USA.  It's good to have that as an example.

I do think we need to decide, as a community, the answers to some questions though:
*
*
*1) has the IETF ever been systemically racist?**
*
*
*
*2) if so, is the IETF systemically racist now?*

I ask this largely because this term was used in an earlier discussion to dismiss a question about whether an accusation of racism in the community was out of order:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/gendispatch/bn97uhBVuD5hTvyR4SsUDq-Q5tc/

I think this question is at the heart of a lot of disagreement (along with questions about the effectiveness of any particular policies, the severity of possible side effects, and whether the biggest missing area of diversity in our community is college educated western middle class people who aren't also cis-whiteish-hetroish males).

The major objection against my draft is a strong one: it doesn't do anything valuable and doesn't say anything valuable - it's just whish-washy motherhood statements that everyone agrees with.  So I'm trying to probe to some extent so see if there's more here or if that's a worthwhile stepping stone towards where the IETF should be going.

I'm all in favour of incremental steps, but I'm keen to make sure they're grounded in the IETF's purpose and grounded in agreement about what the IETF is and why it exists and succeeds.

Cheers,

Bron.

--
  Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
  [e-mail]